I recently watched a video of the implosion of the LifeWay Draper Tower, a Nashville landmark associated with the Southern Baptist Convention. In the video, you can hear the explosion rumbling deep below, but nothing is happening. Then a few windows pop out. Next, the first floors begin to cave in, but the top floor remains rather steady. Then it, too, collapses. This video reminds me a lot of what I saw at the Tennessee Capitol this week.

As I spoke with some legislators about bills touching on issues related to human sexuality, it was clear to me that their perspective is like that of the person on the top floor of the LifeWay Draper Tower after the explosion first went off.

As these legislators sit on the upper-level floors of their really nice new offices in the Cordell Hull Building, some can hear a rumbling outside—talk about the impact of the gay rights agenda and same-sex “marriage” on the family and religious liberty. But it’s just noise to a number of them, a distraction from their work on job creation and education reform.

But that noise is the implosion of the foundation on which the state’s long-term welfare rests. The collapse of that welfare about which so many legislators crowed so proudly after Gov. Haslam’s State of the State speech on Monday night will come, in time, as surely as it came to the top floor of the LifeWay Draper Tower.

That foundation was referenced the next night by, of all people, President Trump, whose policies so many Tennessee Republican legislators say they want to emulate at the state level. “In America,” he said, “we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of American life. The motto is ‘in God we trust.’”

Trump was right. But while many Tennessee legislators will give echo to those words when they speak to their constituents back home, their echo often gets drowned out when they are in Nashville. Here is an example of what I’m talking about.

Right now, state Attorney General Herbert Slatery has fully bought into the “gender identity” legal philosophy, which says there is no longer any male and female, at least when it comes to family law.1 As recently as December 13, his office argued that a state judge should interpret the word “male” to also mean “female” in one of our marriage statutes. Last summer in Knoxville, his office argued that the word “husband” in a birth certificate statute must be interpreted to mean or include a “wife.”

Our attorney general is helping our courts implode the very legal foundation on which God’s design for the family rests and, thus, embracing a faith alien to the majority of Tennesseans who believe God has made us male and female. And to make matters worse, his office is bypassing our elected legislators by insisting that judges impose these alien views on us.

What our attorney general is doing, and doing without any accountability to the people or even to any group of people directly accountable to the people, has highlighted a problem with our state Constitution. The unelected justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court appoint our attorney general.

Given that our law schools teach those who become our justices that Constitutions are “living” documents, are those justices even going to think twice about appointing an attorney general who will advocate for giving them the power to set public policy by finding new rights in our state Constitution and by reinterpreting unambiguous words in our state’s statutes?

For that reason, along with a few other good reasons, Sen. Ken Yager (R-Kingston) presented to the Senate Judiciary on Tuesday a resolution to amend the state Constitution. Under the amendment, the Legislature, accountable to us, would appoint the attorney general, the same as they appoint the state’s comptroller, treasurer, and secretary of state.

Three Republican state senators said they would vote to send the amendment out of the committee to the Senate floor for a vote, for which we’re grateful, otherwise it would have died right them. But they said they wouldn’t vote for it on the floor.

It seems that there are a number of legislators who are content with a system that has given us an unaccountable attorney general who is blowing up in our law what even President Trump recognizes as our foundation.

Someday the implosion will reach the seventh floor of the Cordell Hull Building where a number of them now sit, unconcerned with the “noise” going on around them, and then they will wonder what happened.

NOTES

Of course, only a fool believes that this androgynous view of human nature will remain confined to family law once the attorney generals of our states and our state and federal judges finish laying that view of human nature into constitutional cement. Why should male or female matter in the workplace or the locker room at the Y if it doesn’t even mean anything in connection with the basic institution of the family that has historically anchored our view of what it means to be human?

David Fowler served in the Tennessee state Senate for 12 years before joining FACT as President in 2006. Read David’s complete bio.

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